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Cerabino: Not-so-upstanding Citizens

Cerabino: Not-so-upstanding Citizens

As a rule, it’s not advisable to take a righteous stand about the integrity of your corporation right after disbanding your Office of Corporate Integrity and firing its four employees before they had a chance to complete their 42 open investigations of fraud and misconduct in your organization.

But that’s the position that Citizens Property Insurance is in these days.

“We will win back the credibility of this company in the eyes of the public,” said Citizens Chairman Carlos Lacasa during a public hearing earlier this week. “But I call upon the press to help us do that by reporting on us responsibly and accurately and to give us a little leeway.”

I’ll see if I can do my part.

To keep things positive, I think it’s important to note that Citizens was so committed to integrity that it had created a web-based employee hotline called “Tell Citizens,” where anonymous allegations of wrongdoing at the company could be lodged.

See? That’s positive.

It would be, however, negative to point out what happened with that hotline.

When that hotline received complaints that seemed to be substantiated, the response was to fire the investigators before they had a chance to get all the documentation they needed to close their investigations.

We should, instead, be expected to give Citizens a little leeway by just believing blanket statements like this:

“A complete and thorough investigation showed that the anonymous allegations did not stand up to the test of proved facts and evidence,” Citizens President Barry Gilway explained at the Citizens Board of Governors meeting this week.

Nothing to see here. Move on.

If the press would only do its job by just accepting Gilway’s statement as fact, that would be a good start to the kind of leeway Citizens is counting on.

After all, the company’s in the process of jacking up insurance rates on homeowners and cutting coverage, despite seven years without a major hurricane in Florida. So this is no time to consider financial mismanagement at the largest insurer in the state, the not-for-profit creation of the state legislature designed as a last-resort hurricane insurance provider to Florida homeowners.

We in the press need to do our part by ignoring that 73-page preliminary report that Citizens’ Office of Corporate Integrity wrote as a prelude to its demise: The report that found quite a bit wrong — both in the handling of finances and personnel — while expressing a desire to get to the bottom of it.

“Upon conclusion, this review disclosed documents supporting in part, the complainant’s allegations involving activities by certain Citizens’ officers and management,” the integrity unit’s report concluded. “To resolve this complaint beyond the document review addressed in this report however, other investigative steps including the review of personnel files and interviews of those named and involved, are needed.”

Dwelling on that would be negative. And getting those management interviews and records would just lead to questions about why $750,000 in severance pay was paid out despite a no-severance-pay policy. And whether millions of dollars was spent on outside lawyers as a way to effectively whitewash bad behavior at the company.

Messy, messy stuff.

Fortunately, there was some titillation in that batch of bad news. One of the investigations involved a drunken company gathering in Tampa three years ago when two female employees removed their bras and danced on the bar.

I’m guessing that Citizens’ managers would be thrilled if we in the press just focused on that bar incident.

Because at this point, following the boobs and not the money is the best Citizens can hope for.